TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Things weren't looking good for our Water Heater at this point. It's surprising how two bolts breaking can totally screw up your day. Our electric water heater died. Specifically the element that does the actual heating failed and needed replacing. The job is a relatively simple task. .Undo the four bolts holding in the old element, disconnect and remove, put in the new element, reconnect and you're good to go. Shouldn't take more than 30 minutes at most. That's how I thought the day might go. Not for me personally but for the electrician our landlord hired to do the job.

iRobot's Roomba... when home robots attack ! Many people think of the inevitable Robot Uprising as a humanoid, Terminator like, robot army, wielding laser guns, hunting us down in some kind of distant future, human Armageddon. What they don't realize is that the robot armies are already taking shape, albeit in a much more passive aggressive form. I've previously documented the Roomba as the first wave of mass produced robots surveilling your home under the guise of being a floor vacuum. These irritating devices are supposed to quietly work away in the background while you perform Yoga poses in peaceful bliss but are actually noisy enough to attract your attention and... why does the thing keep missing that one spot in the middle of the floor but has cleaned the same corner four times already!

I was watching one of those tacky relationship repair shows that are kind of like watching a car crash - you know you shouldn't look but you just can't help yourself. In this particular episode one male partner had decided to take his temporary, switch partner skateboarding as a way of helping her try things more fun and out of her comfort zone. Predictably she wasn't happy, at first. "How old are you?" was one of her stand out comments. You hear this so often as a skateboarder, once you start getting into your thirties and beyond. Specifically from females who've 'grown up' and have to deal with serious things like family and careers.

Is Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 as good as the first movie which was received so well? Overall I would say yes it is but I would give the first movie a slight edge. I say that mainly because everything the original movie had to offer was new, exciting and unlike any Marvel movie released to that point - and it delivered on all the promises seen in the trailers and then some. Volume 2 doesn't have the benefit of being completely new but it makes up for that with new characters, locations and the chance to dive deeper into existing and new character relationships.

HTC Vive Virtual Reality System. Image: vive.com Virtual Reality is a business opportunity waiting to happen in so many niche markets. Currently you can experience a kind of Virtual Reality using just your mobile phone and one of the many affordable phone VR headsets, with the most basic being Google Cardboard . But the real VR experience is immersive, allowing you to interact with the virtual environment. To do that you need equipment that is much more sophisticated, requires more space, and is more costly than a simple phone based headset.